8.4 Bodily Injury, Property Damage, and Personal/Advertising Injury

The Three Liability Coverages in the CGL

The ISO Commercial General Liability Coverage Form (CG 00 01) is organized into three insuring agreements. Each defines a distinct category of harm, and the exam expects you to slot a fact pattern into the right one and the right limit:

• Coverage A — Bodily Injury (BI) and Property Damage (PD) liability.
• Coverage B — Personal and Advertising Injury liability.
• Coverage C — Medical Payments (no-fault, small limit).

The trigger for Coverage A is an occurrence, defined as an accident, including continuous or repeated exposure to substantially the same harmful conditions. Coverage B does not require an occurrence — it lists specific offenses.

Bodily Injury and Property Damage Defined

• Bodily injury (BI) — bodily injury, sickness, or disease sustained by a person, including death resulting from it. Standard ISO language does not include purely emotional distress unless tied to physical injury.
• Property damage (PD) — physical injury to tangible property, including resulting loss of use; or loss of use of tangible property that is not physically injured. Note: electronic data is not tangible property under the standard CGL.

A classic trap: a contractor's faulty work that damages only the contractor's own work product is typically excluded (the business-risk "your work" exclusion), while damage to other property is covered PD.

Personal and Advertising Injury (Coverage B)

Coverage B responds to enumerated offenses, not accidents. The standard CG 00 01 lists seven:

1. False arrest, detention, or imprisonment
2. Malicious prosecution
3. Wrongful eviction or wrongful entry / invasion of privacy (right of private occupancy)
4. Oral or written publication of material that slanders or libels a person or organization
5. Oral or written publication of material that violates a person's right of privacy
6. Use of another's advertising idea in your advertisement
7. Infringing on another's copyright, trade dress, or slogan in your advertisement

Note that patent and trademark infringement are excluded — a frequently tested distinction. Coverage B has its own aggregate-eroding limit shared within the general structure.

CGL Limits Structure — How the Numbers Stack

Worked example: limits are $1,000,000 each occurrence / $2,000,000 general aggregate / $2,000,000 products-completed aggregate. Three unrelated $800,000 premises claims occur in one year. The first two pay in full ($1.6M), but the general aggregate caps total premises payments at $2,000,000, so the third claim pays only $400,000 — and products claims draw from their separate $2M aggregate, unaffected.

Loss of Use as Property Damage

A subtle, tested point: property damage includes not only physical injury to tangible property but also loss of use of tangible property that is not physically injured. Example: a contractor's negligence shuts down a neighboring store for a week without damaging it; the store's loss of use is covered property damage even though nothing was physically harmed.

Personal vs. Advertising Injury Offenses

Personal and advertising injury is an enumerated list of offenses, not accidents, and you should recognize the specific torts: false arrest/detention, malicious prosecution, wrongful eviction/wrongful entry, libel/slander/defamation, oral or written publication that violates privacy, use of another's advertising idea, and copyright/trade dress/slogan infringement in your advertisement. Note the exam trap: patent and trademark infringement are excluded from advertising injury.

Because these are offenses rather than occurrences, the CGL provides this coverage on a separate insuring agreement (Coverage B) with its own conditions and exclusions.

Bodily Injury vs. Personal Injury Terminology

The exam exploits a vocabulary overlap. Bodily injury (BI) means physical injury, sickness, disease, and resulting death — a physical-harm concept. Personal injury (within "personal and advertising injury") covers non-physical, intangible wrongs such as defamation and wrongful eviction. So an insured sued for slander needs Coverage B (personal/advertising injury), not Coverage A (BI/PD) — recognizing which insuring agreement responds is a common multiple-choice answer that hinges purely on this terminology.

Mental Anguish and the BI Definition Debate

A tested nuance: whether purely emotional distress without physical injury qualifies as bodily injury depends on the policy's definition and state law. Standard CGL "bodily injury" requires physical injury, sickness, or disease, so emotional harm alone may fall outside Coverage A — and may instead implicate personal injury offenses under Coverage B if it stems from defamation or invasion of privacy. Recognizing which insuring agreement captures emotional-distress claims is a higher-difficulty exam discrimination.

The "Occurrence" Link to BI and PD

Coverage A responds only when BI or PD arises from an occurrence — defined as an accident, including continuous or repeated exposure to substantially the same harmful conditions. Intentional or expected injury is therefore outside Coverage A. This ties the BI/PD definitions to the trigger: the harm must be both a covered type (physical injury or tangible-property damage/loss of use) and result from a fortuitous occurrence, a two-part test the exam applies to coverage-A fact patterns.